Released in 1983, TRAVELER is Steve's second solo and his first album on vinyl LP; a big accomplishment in and of itself back in the day. Recorded both in a large pro studio (José Feliciano's) and in the early Timeroom in Culver City California, this music revealed the young Steve Roach as a synthesist of limitless imagination and broad compositional depth. The thrust of his synthesized matrices evinces realms of austere metallic beauty, worlds yet to be explored, topographies hosting civilizations caught between the rugged girth of the past and the brilliance of a better future. Ideally, allow this music to simply flow over and through you. A travelogue of worlds both gorgeous and shadowed pieces of ambient expressionism that hint at the future of his vast explorations interface with ease. The pulsing title track "Traveler" is a quixotic exploration through a post-Schulze digi-zone of stormy synth riffs and sequencer majesty. Even the Tribal era in Steve's later work is birthed on pieces like T.B.C. and Mysteries Continue. Both NOW, Steve's debut release and TRAVELER launched Roach's qualitative talent onto an unsuspecting world presenting a harbinger of things to come in is massive body of work now expanding into its fourth decade. -- Darren Bergstein, ei